100,000 TROOPS FOR 30 YEARS…..Marc Lynch says of surge supporter Stephen Biddle, “he’s a serious guy so I take him seriously.” Here’s his precis of a talk Biddle gave on Friday:
Without getting in to his arguments or my reservations, I just wanted to lay out Biddle’s best case scenario as he presented it: if everything goes right and if the US continues to “hit the lottery” with the spread of local ceasefires and none of a dozen different spoilers happens, then a patchwork of local ceasefires between heavily armed, mistrustful communities could possibly hold if and only if the US keeps 80,000-100,000 troops in Iraq for the next twenty to thirty years. And that’s the best case scenario of one of the current strategy’s smartest supporters. Man.
Man indeed.
